A short story by novelist Gillian Mcallister

Desperate times call for desperate measures...

It will be all over the news, Susan is thinking. A hold-up in a bank. She can hardly believe it. Normal, middle-aged her. This morning she was watching the Emmerdale omnibus and ironing. And now… this.

Her lips are quivering with nerves, teeth chattering. She looks out of the plate-glass window to the high street, trying to distract herself, wondering what to do. How to survive it. Wondering, too, which of the forks in the road led her to this particular bank on this particular rainy Tuesday morning. She supposes, tracing it back, it is the job that paid cash-only, the one she was forced to get after Jason stopped paying maintenance.

As soon as she got the job – walking dogs in Hampstead – she started going to the bank more. Most Tuesdays, to deposit her earnings. She found it satisfying, that tangible wad of notes, as soft as a packet of tissues, that

she released into the automatic deposit machine. Those notes were the evidence she was going to be OK, with or without Jason’s maintenance.

She liked the routine of the bank on Tuesdays. She got to know the regulars. They’re all here today. The teller who always carefully matches her nails to her lipstick. The sort of attention to detail Susan likes to see in a bank teller. She can imagine the rest of the teller’s life, too. She’ll have fish on Fridays and roasts on Sundays and set out her polishes and lipsticks for the week ahead.

Here, too, is the man with the bent spine, three distinct spherical vertebrae at his neck curving like the top of a walking stick. He always deposits a handful of coins, nothing more. She’s been meaning to ask what he does for a living. A busker, maybe, she thinks, looking at him, his hands above his head, as requested. No, maybe that’s judgmental.

Next to her is the driving instructor. He wears two signet rings and a too-tight gold chain around his neck which leaves

pockmarked impressions in his skin. Late forties. He has – usually, though not today – an opinion on everything. Politics, state schools, street parking. A public highway belongs to no one, he once said, incorrectly. Susan used to work for the highways agency, before. Before Jason. Before redundancy, the final warning bills, the bailiff waiting silently on her drive for her to open the door.

Now, driving-instructor man is shaking. His shoulders are up, his head down. Pure fear. As he removes his hand from the arm of the red plastic chair, he leaves a perfect sweaty handprint which fades away to nothing as Susan watches, thinking, trying to be logical about it, but nothing about this situation, this siege, is logical. How much money is kept in the bank? How much could the teller lay her hands on realistically? A few thousand? £100,000?

She catches the eye of the teller. She’s served Susan every Tuesday for over a year. Her mascara has begun to form little clumps on her bottom lashes. Something passes between them. Terror. The hair around the teller’s temples is damp with sweat. Susan wonders how her own terror is manifesting itself.

Her hands begin to shake, just like the driving instructor’s. Hers aren’t clammy. They’re dry and cold, like somebody has put her out in a snowstorm, and not in a warm bank. The adrenaline moves through her body. Her stomach clenches with it. Oh God, she’s going to be sick, here in the bank in front of everyone.

Susan wonders if she is on the news. Sky News, that ticker tape running underneath. She imagines the headlines now. Siege in High Street Bank. Bank in Hampstead held up at gunpoint.

Because there is a gun. And it is pressing into Susan’s skin. That is what’s responsible for her trembling shoulders, her churning stomach. It doesn’t feel quite how she thought it might, should she ever have imagined such a thing. Not as cold. But then it’s been against her skin for a while now. The tip is body temperature. Thirty-seven point five degrees.

Think. She needs a strategy. She looks across at the teller again. But there is no strategy. She hasn’t thought this through. Her mind is not logical, jumping from one thing to another.

She takes a slow breath, then a second. She never thought she’d end up here, but she is here, she tells herself. Jason stopping the maintenance, the redundancy. The letter from the council, where she used to work, saying that if her council tax wasn’t paid her ex-colleagues would arrange for debt collectors to be sent to her house. Using cash for a year and so knowing the ins and outs of the bank. They’ve all been stepping stones along the same path.

She looks down at her all-black outfit. She’s unidentifiable, she hopes, her features obscured by the balaclava made from an old winter hat. The gun is now fully body temperature in her hand: she’s procrastinated enough. She raises it, points it at the teller’s red lips, cocks it the way she saw on Youtube, and says: “Empty the till. I need £5,000.” ●S